Organoids—Mini Guts Help Answer Big Questions About Intestinal Nutrient Transport

Abstract

Eating healthy foods supplies your body with nutrients to stay strong. But did you ever wonder how nutrients enter your body? After chewing and swallowing, your food is digested, and enters the gut as mush. If you picture your intestine as a tube, the food is on the inside and your body is around the tube. The inner layer of the tube that touches the food is formed by special cells that can transport nutrients like sugar and protein. Some people cannot properly absorb nutrients. The molecules that transport nutrients also transport certain drugs. Thus, investigating intestinal transport is very important to help people with absorption issues and to design better drugs. We used a new scientific model called organoids to study intestinal transport processes. Organoids are tiny “mini-guts” grown in the lab from human cells. Organoids have many advantages over other models used by scientists to study the gut.